Alpena, Michigan. A winter wonderland...

...if you like that sort of thing. For me Im all about warmth and theres a definate lack of it on the Lake Huron coastal community known as Alpena.

I went there for a Operational Readiness Inspection practice. FOr those of you who dont know what that is... Its "being deployed", usually to "Korea" but in this case it was "Japan" (Alarm Red WoooHoooo).

So it all started out on Sunday the 11th with a cat knocking a vase off our dresser and it shattering on the floor at 530am. Liz and I got up to clean it up. Vacuumed all the glass shards up and had just laid back down to go back to sleep when I get a phone call... "Why aren't you processing right now?" Asked the voice.

To which I replied, "uhhhhh.... Because no one told me to be there right now."

ANd the voice responded with, "Well you need to get there now.''

Apparently I was the only one who didnt get word that our processing time for the flyaway was at 6am. Luckily I had known I was processing on Sunday, albeit I thought it would be later in the day, so I was fairly well ready for it.

There started a really long, grueling day of hurry up and wait. It takes 8 hours to process for a deployment. They basically take you from one place to another to do paperwork or get this and that and then you wait to go to the next place. And it all culminates with a 4 hour wait in the "holding cell", the last room you see of Fairchild before you get on the plane and leave.

I then loaded on a C-5, one of the worst flights you can take if you get the smallest bit of motion sicknes by the way... The seats are looking backwards so it really messes with you equilibrium. It was a four hour flight to Alpena (amazingly, it was also a four hour flight to Savannah Georgia, not quite sure how that time vortox worked). We landed, and it was probably about 5 degrees out wiht now breeze that night, luckily. So it was cold but not as cold as it would get. Thats when we started our inprocessing which took forever because of the long line. By the time we got to our room (I'll explain in a bit why I use that in a singular tense). It was 2am by the time we went to sleep in our cold bay full of beds... Yep thats right, Basic Training style for the week. Not for everyone though... only for guys who weren't important... But that doesnt mean that all non-important males slept in the bays, there were rooms with two to a room and a bathroom down the hall. That was mainly for important people but they did manage to put some non-important people in those... I just wasn't one of them. So I got to lsiten to guys complain about how hot their rooms were and how they had to sleep with their windows open at night... while I slept ina room that created ice on the wall when I left my bag next to it at night. The heater blew across the top of the room keeping it hot up high but down low it was below freezing. Luckily I brought my sleeping bag. Even in that I was sleeping in thermals to stay warm lol.

Anyway, after four hours of sleep I went back into work to set up my CTK, and being one of the few people who drive a forklift I sat in an open cabin 10k for 3 hours moving cadillac bins, pallets and then using the 10k to lift deicing fluid up above the deicier to fill it up... To say the least I was freezing cold during all this.

To shorten this up some I did this same stuff through the next couple days adding in the wear of chem gear as well.

Then on Thursday, we got the redeployment order and started packing up.

On Friday I was supposed to process my cargo with reserve aero postal guys. They suck by the way. They came by on friday morning and saw I had a 10k and asked if they could use it to speed themselves up. To which I said sure, as long as you help me move my cargo when it has to process, because I hadnt had a chance to move it myself yet... When it came time to process they had forgotten where they got the 10k and gave me a bunch of grief for not having my cargo out at the build up area. To which I reminded them where they got the 10k, to which they begrudged me the use of the enclosed 10k to move my stuff out and weigh it for them.... Next time Im not giving up my 10k till Im done with it.

The aero postal guys single handedly screwed up the redeployment of aircraft by not loading a C-5 on time. Which slipped my flight home back about 12 hours. So I finally made it home at about 5pm last night.

I went to get all my bags. Found two of them right away and set them to the side... Went to search for my last bag, found it and went back to grab my other 2... which had disappeared now... I found one of them back in the pile for pick up, so someone moved my bags again... the other was picked up by someone else... All my cold weather gear walked off in someone elses hands....

There ends my week... abbreviated becuase I didnt realize how much I had to type about.

I'll edit this later when I get the 2 pictures I took loaded on the internet

Open Bay in Alpena Michigan


Ice buildup on the wall